Oscar Isaac plays Llweyn Davis who is only moderately talented and lacking the luck and timing to succeed. Llewyn is no Bob Dylan. But we are left to wonder whether with a little more talent and a little more luck he might have been and what is the thin line that divides the two.
But Bob Dylan did go to New York and make it big in the Greenwich Village folk scene during the period that the film is set in and as Joel Coen said during the press conference Dylan is the elephant in the room when speaking about the film. The Coen Brothers make a point of saying that the film is not based on the life of Bob Dylan, He was nonetheless a defining and transformative character for both the music and the culture of the period. Even the Welsh sounding name of their lead character references back to Dylan’s.
Speaking at the press conference Joel Coen said: “The music of the period and in the film is something that we have a deep fondness and respect for although there are many funny things about folk music.”
Llewyn is a moderately talented singer and guitarist who is screwed up, unreliable, living off others and sleeping on their couches and looking for rent free spaces to crash with his sister or scrounging off his friends. He wants to make it as a successful musician in New York but at the same time he is not particularly appealing or charismatic and many of the obstacles that stop him from reaching the success that he believes he deserves are of his own making.
We are used to seeing films about the talented and ambitious person who goes to the big city and wins over obstacles to succeed. But the Llewyn experience is the far more common one as for every Bob Dylan success story there are thousands of Llewyns who never made it and who we never heard of. The Coen brothers show us this transformative and legendary period in popular music and culture through the eyes of a loser.
The script is A-class Coen brothers and we are kept laughing while at the same time aware that some deeper philosophical question is being examined. What is the difference between someone who makes it and someone who doesn’t. As Ethan Coen said speaking at the press conference, the character has a tortured relationship with success.
Justin Timberlake plays Jim part of the folk singing duo Jim and Jean with Carey Mulligan as Jean. Timberlake said he modeled his character to some extent on the Irish folksinger Paul Clayton and that having been born in Tennessee and growing up with country and blues music he felt a “warm and fuzzy” relationship to the folk music in the film that he performs.
Mulligan plays the rough talking Jean that is furious when the hero Llewyn carelessly gets her pregnant. Isaac gives a wonderfully underplayed performance as Llewyn with no easy task to hold our interest in a character that is essentially unappealing. Even when he is asked to look after the cat of a friend he fails and the reappearance of the cat throughout the film becomes one of the running jokes.
A highlight of the story is when Llewyn decides to go on a hitch-hiking trip to Chicago in a surreal take on the road movie genre. He ends up in a car with Coen brothers stock character John Goodman who plays an aging jazz musician as an old gasbag who cannot stop talking and proves a nightmare companion to be trapped in a car with.
The actors recorded the songs live on the set and as Isaac says the singing rehearsals they did before the shooting actually helped them define the characters.
The Coen brothers have succeeded in that difficult task of making a film that is both uproariously funny and leaves you with deeper questions to ponder as you leave the cinema.
Credits:
Directed by Ethan Coen Joel Coen
Country:USA
Cast: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, F Murray Abraham, Justin Timberlake
